Parity in California Community Colleges

The fall 2015 CPFA Journal contains a long article that explains the history of pay parity achieved by the 72 California community college districts, from 1985 to 2013 (the last year for which we have data). The data sources are all from the Chancellor’s office Datamart (from 2000-2013) and from Chris Storer’s spreadsheet, which was a heroic twenty-year effort at recording PTF hourly pay, FTF annual pay, office hrs, and health coverage (as well as number of faculty teaching) and used some of these data streams calculated parity for over twenty years. The parity chart can be foundhere.

The instructions for putting the chart “in motion” are as follows. IF, when you open the parity chart, you find the chart in front of you, you’re in luck. All you have to do is hit the

play button and you will see each circle move through a 27-year period (1985-2013). Each colored circle represents a district.

Movement toward the right indicates an increase in pay. Movement upward indicates an improvement in pay parity (the relationship between the annual pay that FTF earn in any given district, in any given year, and the annualized hourly pay of PTF. PTF annualized pay is calcuated by using the reported hourly pay, multiplied by 525 the FTE). If you go to the sidebar on the right, and find your own district you can highlight it and watch it in relation to the rest of the state.

If you go to the sidebar on the right, and find your own district you can highlight it and watch it in relation to the rest of the state.

Want to get fancy? Make all the districts a “unique color”

Then you will see each district separately.

This is how the chart will look if you make each district a “distinct” color. That turquoise dot at the top is an “ideal district” with around 90-88% actual parity, and is used to scale the graph appropriately.

At the bottom of the district list you will see a wrench. Wrench options (for controlling the opacity of the background districts).

You can then select just one district, or two or three, and opaque out the others using the wrench tool. Then you can follow your own school through the years. Don’t like the trails (pretty cluttered if you want to compare more than one or two districts)? Just un-click the trails √ check block at the bottom of the list of districts.

What if the CPFA parity google.doc file has been fouled up by someone, and you just see a list of district names? No problem. But this is a bit harder.

Select ALL the districts, over to the parity percent (do not include the FTF annual pay. Do not include the category labels such as District, year, etc. This takes some perseverance, as there are over 500 lines to this graph!

Once everything is highlighted, go to the top menu and INSERT, then drop down to chart.

You will see the chart editor. Move to “Chart types”

Move to the “other” category and click on the motion chart. After you click on that chart, you will be back at step one, above, and you can select districts, opaque out the background, compare districts, and display, or not display, the historical trails.

Think something is wrong with the data? Feel free to double check the data with the chancellor’s office datamart. Please let me know if you discover any errors. And let me know what you think of this fabulous visualization tool or let me know if you need “extra help” getting it to work. Want to work up your own graphs? You can copy the data onto your own google.doc spreadsheet (use the file drop down menu at the top of the google.doc and then click copy. You will then have a copy of the data that you can customize. What do we need? I would say a break down by union representation. We could do an “average hourly” (that could conceivably be weighted by number of faculty in each edu-union or faculty association, then put those three or four streams in a race to see which representational group has the best record.